Chapter 47: Brother Shen

They came to the Jade River in the last light of the fourteenth day.

It was a wide, slow, green river, running between banks of reeds and willows through a country of low gray hills, and the ford was a long shallow crossing of flat stones, set across the current at a point where the water was no deeper than a man’s knee. On the far side, a ferryman’s hut stood beside a stand of dark pines. There was no ferryman. There was a thin blue plume of smoke from the chimney, and a lantern lit in the window, and a very peculiar silence.

Gu pulled the cart to a halt.

"I do not like it," he said.

"It is a ford," said Ji Ling’er. "There is a hut. There is a lamp."

"That is what I do not like." His dark eyes moved slowly across the far bank. "A ferryman who lights his lamp at sundown and does not come out to meet the travelers is either asleep, or drunk, or dead. And I have been all three."

Tax Collector, in the shafts, had laid his ears flat against his skull.

"He agrees," said Li Xuan.

"He does not like water."

"He does not like anything," said Ye’er, in a small voice. "But he does not do that with his ears unless there is something bad."

She was sitting very stiffly on the bench with the lacquer box in her lap, and her small face had gone pale. She was looking at the hut. She was looking, in particular, at the thin blue smoke from the chimney, which had a faint, greenish, oily look, and was not rising straight, but curling, very slowly, toward the road.

"It is moss-smoke," she whispered. "Burned with pine-resin. It is how you..." She swallowed. "It is how we signal. It means, the way is clear. It means, come."

Nobody spoke.

"We could turn back," said Aunt Liu.

"The next ford is nine days upstream," said Gu. "And whoever is in that hut will simply follow."

"Then we shall cross."

Li Xuan said it very quietly. They looked at him.

"But we shall do it with the lamp," he said, "and the tea."

They crossed at dusk, at a walk, in a loose line.

Gu led, on foot, with his sword unsheathed and carried low at his side. Ji Ling’er walked on his left, with the frost already crawling in a thin white skin across the water about her ankles. Aunt Liu rode in the cart with her medicine box open on her knees. Li Xuan walked at the donkey’s head, with a hand on the bridle, and a clay jar of Aunt Liu’s green tea slung from his shoulder.

The water was cold. It rose to his knees. Under it, the flat stones of the ford were slick with weed.

Halfway across, the lantern in the ferryman’s window went out.

"Down!" said Gu.

It was not a word. It was a command that went through them all like a blow. Ji Ling’er dropped to one knee. Li Xuan flung himself against the cart. Something whistled over his head, a fine, pale, glittering sound, like a swarm of tiny insects, and struck the cart’s wooden side with a hundred small soft thuds.

Needles.

Each was no longer than a finger. Each was black with a thin green film. They stood in a dense cluster in the planks, humming faintly, and the wood around them was already turning gray and soft.

"Poison Sect," said Ji Ling’er between her teeth.

"Of course it is," said Gu.

Figures came out of the pines.

There were six of them, in the gray robes of the sect, with the vine-brand on their cheeks. Four were young. One was heavy and thickset, with a face like a dull knife. And the sixth, who walked in front, was a lean, pale, solemn man of about thirty, with a long thin face and mild brown eyes, who carried a small bronze box in the crook of his arm as though it were a baby.

"Brother Shen," said Ye’er.

She had said it in a very small voice. It carried in the dusk like a bell.

The pale man stopped.

He looked at the cart. He looked at the old woman and the old man and the young woman with the frost round her feet, and the thin young man in the patched blue robe holding a donkey’s bridle, and finally at the little figure on the bench, with a black lacquer box in her arms.

"Little Ye," he said gently.

He did not sound angry. He sounded tired, and rather sad.

"They told us that you were dead." He tilted his head. "The Master said that you had been caught in the ice-house, and that the scholar had put you in a cellar under the earth. I did not believe it. I said, she is a clever girl. She will have run." His brown eyes searched her face. "And you have been riding on a cart."

"Brother Shen." Her voice shook. She set the lacquer box down on the bench, very carefully, and stood up. "You poured it in the canal."

He did not move.

"You poured the first vat. In the Ninth Ward. You knew what it was. You told me it was a sleeping-draught for the rich." She was crying, without noise, and her thin shoulders were rigid. "There were forty-three children. They were seven. They were..."

"I know how old they were."

He said it very quietly.

The silence on the river was complete. Even the water seemed to have stopped. The four young disciples shifted their feet.

"I did not know," said Shen at last. His mild face was gray. "Not until after. Not until I saw them in the street." His long hands tightened on the bronze box. "The Master said that it was for the Rite. That it would only make them sleep. That it would be cured, afterward, by the Ancestors’ grace." His mouth twisted. "I believed him. I have always believed him. He is the only man who ever gave me a name."

"Brother..."

"I have come to bring you home."

"No."

"The Master is not angry. He says you are a child, and that children make errors. He says that if you come back, he will forgive." The mild voice was gentle, and very sorry. "If you do not, he has told me to kill you, and I shall have to do it, little Ye. I do not wish to."

Gu moved.

Li Xuan did not see him do it. One moment the old man stood in the water, with his sword hanging at his side. The next, the sword was a clean bright line in the dusk, and the bronze box in Shen’s arm had cracked open from top to bottom, and a long green tongue of moss fell out of it, hissing, into the river.

"That," said Gu pleasantly, "was the first."

The poisoners went for him all at once.

It was ugly, and swift, and over before Li Xuan had drawn breath. The four young ones came in a rush, with needles flying and green fire in their palms, and the thickset one with a short curved blade. Ji Ling’er met them in the middle of the river. Her frost went out in a long white fan over the water, and the green fire guttered, and she was among them with her sword like a woman walking through a field of grain, not hurrying, not missing, her cold blue eyes steady, her feet light on the flat stones. Aunt Liu was in the cart, flinging handfuls of something pale and fine into the air. Gu stood in the water, with his back to the cart, and moved like a man doing a very old, familiar dance.

The thickset man died first, quite quickly. It was not Gu who killed him. It was the river.

He had run at the old man with the curved blade, and Gu had stepped in, the quarter-turn, the half-step, and the man’s own weight had carried him off the edge of the stones and into the deep channel beside the ford, where the current took him like a leaf.

Then it was only Shen.

He stood quite alone, in the center of the ford, with the shattered bronze box at his feet. His four young followers lay frozen in the shallows, white to the neck, gasping. His thin mild face was set. There was a short bone knife in his hand, and the blade of it glistened green.

Gu advanced on him with his sword raised.

"Wait," said Li Xuan.

He had not raised his voice. He had only stepped forward, through the knee-deep water, with the clay jar in his hand, until he stood between the old man and the poisoner. His patched blue sleeves were wet to the elbow. He looked very thin and very ordinary and quite calm.

"Brother Shen," he said. "I should like to ask you something."

Shen’s brown eyes flickered. "Stand aside, scholar."

"What is the first law of the Poison Sect?"

The knife wavered.

"Every poison has its cure beside it," said Li Xuan gently. "It is why you are not simply butchers. A girl told me that, in a cold green room full of moss, and she put her arms in a bed of it to the elbow, and drew out the root. Forty-three children woke." He paused. "I have a jar of her tea here. The root of the moss, and chrysanthemum, and a little jade leaf. I think that it is the cure for what you have in your blood."

"I have nothing in my blood."

"Dream-Bone," said Ye’er, from the bench, in a very small voice. "It’s in your sleeve, Brother Shen. You have been carrying it nine days. You have been drinking a little every night, so that you could bear it."

Shen’s face changed.

It was a small change. It was the face of a man who has been struck by something so obvious and so close that he cannot see it. His eyes went to his left sleeve, where a thin green stain showed through the cloth at the wrist. His lips parted.

"The Master..." he began.

"The Master told you it kept off the cold," said Li Xuan. "And that it made the grief easier to bear. I think that it did. It makes everything easier to bear. That is what it is for." He held out the jar. "It is why you could pour a vat of poison in a canal, and sleep."

The river ran on in the dusk. The knife trembled.

Then, very slowly, Shen’s hand opened.

The bone blade fell into the water with a tiny splash. He stood quite still. His thin shoulders had begun to shake, and he put both hands over his face, as a child does, and made no sound.

Aunt Liu was already climbing out of the cart.

They sat by a fire in the pines, in the dark, with the river muttering below them. The four young disciples had been bound, not unkindly, and given a bowl of hot rice. The thickset man was not found. Gu said that he would turn up in the lower reaches, eventually, and that it would be very unpleasant for everyone. Ji Ling’er sat apart, cleaning her sword with a strip of cloth and not saying anything. Her face was grim.

Shen sat at the fire’s edge with his knees drawn up and a bowl of green tea in both hands. He was shivering. He had been shivering for an hour. Aunt Liu had made him drink it, all of it, in three long gulps, and he had been sick, quite violently, in the bushes, and afterward he had sat down very quietly, with a look of dazed and terrible clarity.

"It is gone," he said. "I can feel it. It is like... like a wall coming down. Everything is too loud."

"It will pass," said Aunt Liu gruffly. "In a week."

"I poured it in the canal."

"Yes."

"I poured it." He stared into the fire. His mild brown eyes were wet. "I will not ask for forgiveness. I do not think that a person is entitled."

"No," said Li Xuan.

He was sitting a little apart, with his copper stove on his knee and his sleeves rolled up. He did not look up. "I think it is something that is given, and not asked. And I think it is not mine to give." He glanced across the fire at the small silent figure beside Aunt Liu, with the lacquer box in her arms, who was looking at the poisoner with an expression he could not read. "But I think there are forty-three people in the Ninth Ward who might one day like to hear that you were sorry."

Shen bowed his head.

"Where is Du Heng?" said Gu, abruptly.

The poisoner did not answer at once. He looked at the fire. When he spoke, his voice was thin.

"He is not at the sect," he said. "He has not been there since the new moon. He left the Poison Sect’s mountain a week after the Ninth Ward, with eleven of his best, and a great many jars. He said that he had been shown something." He swallowed. "He said that the old men in the red palace were fools. That they had not known what they had. That there was a thing in the south that was worth more than all the Rites in the world."

"What thing?"

"I do not know. He did not say." Shen shook his head. "But I know where he went. It was on the letters. He sent for the others, by crane, from the south. I carried one myself." His hand tightened on the bowl. "He has joined the Blood-Blade Sect."

The fire popped.

"The Blood-Blade Sect," said Gu softly.

"They have a mountain on the southern border, and a very great deal of silver, and a blood-pool." Shen looked up. "They are at war with a little sect that no one has ever heard of. A sect with an old library, on a mountain with nine terraces. The Master says that the Blood-Blade is going to burn it, and that he is going to help."

No one spoke.

In the silence, Li Xuan became aware that every head in the circle had turned, very slowly, and was looking at him.

"The Sky-Clearing Sect," he said.

"I think that is the one," said Shen. "Yes."

He set down his bowl, and put his hands on his knees. He looked, for the first time, quite steady.

"If you are going there," said Brother Shen, "I think that I should like to come."

Gu looked at him for a long time.

"No," he said at last. "You will stay here, and mend. And in a month, you will go to the Ninth Ward, and ask the baker for a bowl of rice." He sheathed his sword. "It is a very good place to begin."

Shen stared at him.

Then, after a moment, he laughed. It was a small, unsteady, astonished sound. And he nodded.